Gives you a certain amount of choice in how the Mafia City game story plays out

Gives you a certain amount of choice in how the Mafia City game story plays out

While I didn’t really get much of a sense of how this system works during my extended hands-on—I spent a bit too much time enjoying the sights of New Bordeaux to reach that point—in theory it’s an interesting way to structure an open world game that gives you a certain amount of choice in how the Mafia City game story plays out (multiple endings will factor into this).

The global quality preset modifies eight core graphics settings—depth of field, ambient occlusion, motion blur, geometry detail, shadow quality, reflection quality, volumetric effects, and antialiasing. Most of the individual settings have Low/Medium/High settings that match to the global preset, with depth of field and motion blur being the only two on/off items.

Which, when you’re a retired soldier-cum-serial criminal hot on the heels of an organised crime initiative, is pretty important, right? Part-time bar work probably won’t cut it and there’s more money to be made in establishing racket crews and hiring cash deposit Consiglieres anyway.

Our original story is below:

In relation to the above tip, we would also suggest that you be aware of how your enemies defend their bases. If you see a defensive setup that makes it hard for you to get in, that’s the one you want to base your defenses on, so learn from your opponents and apply what you’ve learned when setting up your defense.

Our review of Mafia 2 was fairly positive, finding that it was a great tribute to the mafia movie genre, but not enough of a game.

So yeah, not great. Whether this is something that'll be fixed in a day one patch, or will be sorted via a forthcoming graphics driver update, remains to be seen, but as it stands it feels like Lincoln is trudging through sludge as I walk around the (very pretty) city of New Bordeaux.

Dan Vavra was the lead designer on Mafia and Mafia 2. He's started work on a new project with a new studio called Warhorse. While the new project is closely under wraps for now, Vavra has started a frank development blog which promises to deliver an honest account of the trials and tribulations of a new studio trying to bring a game to market.